Green Tennis - good products, good ideas

treblings

Hall of Fame
There´s a lot of waste in Tennis.
Most products are built using oil-based incredients.
Millions of balls and ball cans, over grips, etc. get thrown away every year.

Does anyone on this board know of a tennis company that has come up with a good product that makes ecological sense?
Any workable ideas on how to reduce waste? That we could try in the local club for example.
 

Max Winther

Semi-Pro
Most companies now make thinner cans for balls. You can also give old balls to schools to use on the legs of chairs. Are the ball cans recyclable?

Strings are pretty wasteful. I'm sure every pro stringer ends up with a bag of strings pretty quick that they have to throw away. It'd be cool if a company could melt down, say copoly for instance, and extrude a new batch of strings using minimal new material. Say one had a cut-out set of cyberflash. They could accumulate enough cyberflash over time to send to Topspin so they could make new strings with it. Not sure if the molecular breakdown or elasticity decline would matter once its all melted down, but it could be researched.
 

ojingoh

Rookie
Most companies now make thinner cans for balls. You can also give old balls to schools to use on the legs of chairs. Are the ball cans recyclable?

Strings are pretty wasteful. I'm sure every pro stringer ends up with a bag of strings pretty quick that they have to throw away. It'd be cool if a company could melt down, say copoly for instance, and extrude a new batch of strings using minimal new material. Say one had a cut-out set of cyberflash. They could accumulate enough cyberflash over time to send to Topspin so they could make new strings with it. Not sure if the molecular breakdown or elasticity decline would matter once its all melted down, but it could be researched.


Interesting stuff. I work in ecological business, I'll tell you what my research has been. I don't know about the tennis industry though so I don't know the state of affairs right now.

Balls: most are made of rubber with poly/cotton/nylon covering. Recyclable
Cans: PET plastic, definitely recyclable, aluminum ring is an additional step to recycle the plastic but doable. The indoor tennis center I go to has ball and can recycling by the front door.
Strings: Impractical to recycle unless you're doing a large amount of them. First off is the hetergenity of string composition -- some nylon, some poly, some gut, some more nylon, aramids, now PTFE (Prince Recoil) -- and amount of string per unit volume. Strings are dense but wirey. I couldn't see building a business around recycling tennis strings even for recycling stock. Virtually all polymers -- nylon, aramids, polys -- are more brittle when recycled.
Racquets: Impossible to recycle into base materials. The fiber in them is pretty useful, as fiber prices in the USA are insane right now (aerospace industry) but getting it out of the resins used to make a tennis racquet are pretty much impossible. The resins in the racquets are pretty hard to crack apart.
Now you could use racquets ground up or something, they could have structural uses as they're pretty stiff and lightweight. Loose Carbon Fiber (CF) is a problem though, studies suggest that it may be a carcinogen. I know that the wet layup rackets from back in the day were definitely a health hazard -- epoxies will kill your brain cells. I don't know offhand what you could use the ground up tennis rackets for.
Shoes/Apparel/Bags: Recyclable
 
I know that the wet layup rackets from back in the day were definitely a health hazard -- epoxies will kill your brain cells.

Maybe true in the past; definitely true if polyester resins were used in the past. But modern epoxy systems are very, very safe to use; respirators are rarely needed, even in high-production volume environments.... (But don't sand epoxy without a dust mask; repeated exposure can lead to epoxy-induced asthma.!)

Epoxy resins are very different than polyester resins, and modern epoxies have shifted to very safe curing agents. Polyester resin systems frequently use MEK as a component of the curing agent, and MEK is a very dangerous chemical.

-frank
 
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